Songs for the Helrrigan

The following entry may contain triggering material and spoilers for Spring Awakening.

The Helrrigan hasn’t shown up in a while, except for one odd dream I had a couple of months ago in which her eye socket was a lagoon. I take this as a good thing, as this fusion god of Hel and the Morrigan generally only drops by when I contemplate suicide.

Although I have technically been contemplating it, it’s been in a more contemplative way. Not so much with a “How shall I…” or “I should because…” but more that it’s theoretically a thing. My grasp of the notion, and relationship with it, is different now. I think the wishcraft would be too, but the songs are the same.

Well this first one at least I discovered more recently than the others. I think it’s one of Florence + the Machine’s more plodding songs but…sounds like the Helrrigan’s vibes, right here.

“Don’t Do Sadness” definitely misses a very significant something to me without “Blue Wind” to counterpoint, but I’m very much liking the ASL revival Moritzes.

I appreciate just how much movement and brightness and life there can be in an uptempo growl-song. When I watch the music video, though, I find myself unsettled. The lead vocalist’s brother had killed himself, from what I’d read. That a song came of it, that’s fair, cathartic, could reach people who need it…and then I imagine what it was like to film the music video, how many takes just to capture the appropriate look of grief, what it would have been like to look at a storyboard so close to the event that inspired the song, casting the family left behind, concept, post-production, editing it all to a marketable gloss and having the artist re-visit the cadence tied to the event over and again.

Listening to the lyrics, I feel that the speaker is saying, accurately in my opinion, “I get it—” ( Hate the mind. Regrets are better left unspoken; For all we know, this void will grow. Everything’s in vain, distressing you…feels so right, I’ll end this all— spot on, and I personally might pick up on a tinge of genre-appropriate anger but not a trace of blame or posthumous shaming). To balance that understanding with how they’re not in such a bad way that they’d actually do the same, retaining instead the dubious privilege of “survived by” status—as in the deceased is survived by so-and-so grieving family members—and the perspective that comes with. (Call your name everyday, when I feel so helpless / I’ve fallen down…but I’ll rise above this, I’ll rise above this doubt, I’ll mend myself before it gets me).